


i laugh all the way to hell

by devours



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-21
Updated: 2013-06-21
Packaged: 2017-12-15 15:17:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/851020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devours/pseuds/devours
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>oh god my writing is such a mess and i'm not satisfied with how i wrote cecil at all, but i've whittled this down way beyond what my patience will allow as it is. and ugh is it weird that i gave cecil the character the same last name as cecil the person? no, right?</p>
<p>annoying self-deprecation aside, i hope you enjoyed my contribution to the very limited pool of welcome to night vale fanfiction! the title is based on a modest mouse song entitled 'missed the boat' which is really quite wonderful for this series if you want to check it out</p></blockquote>





	i laugh all the way to hell

 

_saying, 'yes, this is a fine promotion.'_

Carlos sipped his coffee and stared at Cecil’s kitchen wall, horror and scientific fascination creating in him an almost disturbing level of calm.

It was a trait that had made him an obvious choice for the head of the Night Vale study. His superiors took note that when presented with the handful of artifacts an early information gathering team had secreted away from the tiny desert town, things like flat, floating black discs that gave off a discordant humming noise or lemons with teeth and human hair growing inside of them in place of seeds, he would simply study them, take notes, and ask a number of level-headed questions as to their origin.

And like the strange black discs and lemons, he found himself staring impassively at the shimmering square hole beneath Cecil’s wall mounted cabinets as if it were an unusual bird and not something so disturbing that he could hardly even begin to wrap his mind around it. Telling Cecil about it occurred to him briefly, but he figured that unless it started to breathe fire he'd let him sleep. He'd probably just end up staring at him like he had two heads, or to put that into more concise terms, he'd look at him with polite concern and confusion at being informed of something as commonplace as a toaster.

So Carlos instead went to Cecil’s living room, picked up his duffel bag full of equipment, and began rooting around in it for an audio recorder and some measuring tape. To think he’d felt ridiculous for packing most of his lab with him for a single night away from his apartment.

Once back in the kitchen Carlos raised the tape recorder to his mouth and began to speak into it, never taking his eyes off of the hole.

“Dr. Carlos Garza. July 9th, 2013. Time... 7:57 AM. Location, ahh... Cecil’s apartment. His kitchen. I had stayed over for the night and woke up this morning at roughly 7:15 AM, and went from the bedroom to the kitchen to make myself, and Cecil when he wakes up, a pot of coffee. I found some in the cupboard-- some brand I’ve never heard of, logo depicting a cartoon lizard with what appears to be human arms and legs, brand name written in Russian, why this town is so hung up on Russian I will never know, contents smelled slightly metallic but I’ve found that most edibles in Night Vale do...”

He shook his head roughly and brought the hand holding the tape recorder up to his forehead, the sound of which could clearly be heard when he played the tape back later.

“ _The hole_ , I’m supposed to be talking about the hole. Anyway, I pulled back Cecil’s coffee pot and noticed this odd... I don’t know what to call it, let’s go with ‘shifting’ quality to the wall behind it. Sort of like ripples on water but not quite so... liquid. I pulled some things away to get a better look at it and that’s when I discovered that the shifting was emanating from a sqaure hole roughly...”

Carlos set the recorder down, picked up the measuring tape, looked directly into the hole and then... stared at it. Very slowly he drew out the measure’s metallic tongue and held it at an arms length just over the opening. After a moment’s consideration he set it back down and spoke again into the tape recorder.

“Um, _very_ roughly, 7 centimeters on each of its sides. Inside the hole is darkness, completely and purely black, but... and again, it’s hard to describe, the darkness appears to be _moving_. It doesn’t make any sense. It wouldn’t make any sense if it was simply a hole opening up into some sort of void, but that pulsing is really getting to me. It’s like trying to comprehend a new color, it’s--”

“Carlos?”

Before he could help himself Carlos yelped, covering his mouth with his hand and using the other to support himself by gripping the countertop.

“Cecil, _Jesus!”_

He turned to see Cecil standing in the doorway, still wearing his pajamas and looking startled and apologetic.

“Oh, I’m sorry Carlos! Were you doing something impor-- oh.” Cecil noticed the tape recorder and the measuring tape and the gaping hole beneath his wall-mounted cabinets. “I see you’ve found _that_.”

Heart still beating rapidly in his chest, Carlos glanced from the hole and then back to Cecil. “So you’re... aware of this?”

“Oh, this is so _embarrassing!”_ Cecil said, drawing the ‘so’ out like a groan. “I’m so sorry you saw that, Carlos, I tried to cover it up when I knew you were coming.”

“Cecil, what do--”

“I should have had it exorcised a long time ago but my damned pride kept me from taking care of it-- I just kept imagining what people might say if they saw an exorcism van parked outside of _Cecil Baldwin’s_ apartment complex. I mean, think of the rumors that would come of it, especially with me being a local celebrity and respected journalist after all...”

“Cecil--”

Cecil flung himself dramatically into a wooden chair with a flourish, ignoring him.

“I couldn’t even stand the idea of a licensed exorcist seeing that eyesore and, like, they see things like that _every day_ , I can’t believe my boyfrie-- oh!”

Now Cecil covered his mouth with his hand and Carlos’s dread and irritation seemed to take a temporary leave of absence.

“...Boyfriend, Cecil?”

“I shouldn’t have said that-- I know we’re not that serious it just sort of came out you know and I--”

Cecil broke off when he noticed Carlos smiling at him.

Carlos was thirty-five and had been single since he was twenty-eight, and somewhere in that span of time the word ‘boyfriend’ he began to associate with his teenage years, when he was young and melodramatic and less than a decade shy of having to be in bed by 9 ‘o clock on school nights. His colleagues and friends seemed to have outgrown the term as well, graduating to partners and husbands and wives, all while he had resigned himself to a life both too busy and prematurely too old to start a relationship.

But Night Vale had a way of laughing at plans and resignations just as God did, and somehow the word didn’t sound quite so foolish coming from Cecil’s mouth as he’d have thought.

“No, no,” he said, stepping up to Cecil’s chair and awkwardly cupping his jaw in his hands. “Boyfriend works.”

Cecil’s eyes widened and then closed tightly shut as Carlos went in for a kiss, gentle and sweet and involving just the perfect amount of tongue to engrave the sensation of it into their long-term memory.

Night Vale would always scare him, and Carlos doubted he’d ever get over the near-constant paranoia and anxiety it inspired within him, but during that kiss he realized that there was honestly no place he’d rather be. Home had stability, home had clocks that worked, home had Orwellian politics of a considerably less overt nature. But home lacked sincerity. Home lacked excitement, home lacked the acquired taste of the sinister and strange.

Most of all, he realized with a pang, home lacked Cecil, the first person in a long time to make him laugh and feel safe in the world, whether he was in a place where his biggest concerns were getting the bills in on time or one where they were leaning much more towards the unsettlingly likely odds of being targeted by a murderous, quarter-of-an-inch-tall militia.

When Carlos broke away Cecil looked up at him, large lamp-lit eyes looking somewhat dazed and out of sorts, but a smile giving away his obvious delight.

“So,” Cecil said, voice so thick with playfully exaggerated seduction that it reduced his booming radio host’s voice to something that more resembled an exhale of breath. “Why don’t we make it official, then?”

Carlos grinned. "I guess my research can wait."

The two of them rushed hand-in-hand from the kitchen, laughing like teenagers and leaving the creatures watching them from a square-shaped opening beneath Cecil's wall-mounted cabinets very confused indeed.

**Author's Note:**

> oh god my writing is such a mess and i'm not satisfied with how i wrote cecil at all, but i've whittled this down way beyond what my patience will allow as it is. and ugh is it weird that i gave cecil the character the same last name as cecil the person? no, right?
> 
> annoying self-deprecation aside, i hope you enjoyed my contribution to the very limited pool of welcome to night vale fanfiction! the title is based on a modest mouse song entitled 'missed the boat' which is really quite wonderful for this series if you want to check it out


End file.
